Guild Wars 2

Similar to holychampion, I’ve played Guardian for over 2 and a half years, mainly on pvp with wvw thrown in there (and very little pve). For Guardian metas, I’ve gone through (approx.) the bunker > bunker hybrid > medi guard > burn guard > DH.

I I have a group of irl friends I normally play with, and halfway through season 1, I knew DH wasn’t cutting it. We were doing alright (because we are decent players, and a 3-5 man pre-made), but personally I was either not bringing enough to the table, or sometimes I ended up just being dead weight I felt. I’m not going to go into specifics of Guardian/DH problems (there’s enough discussion already about projectile reflect/lack of mobility/etc.), but I didn’t think I was as bad a player as my record was showing.

Then something miraculous happened — I swapped to rev.

JI on a 5 second cd? Yes please
4k more base health? Yes please
No cd stun-break/evade? Yes please
Better overall sustain for damage? Yes please

And I could go on. Now I’m not saying rev is broken op or anything, as there’s already a discussion about its susceptibility to condis (which makes it much tougher to play for sure, in addition to it’s continual nerfs), but I think you get the point I’m trying to make.

Not to boast, but after the switch our casual group ended up making it to top 10 in the leader-boards multiple times, in addition to participating in the guild challenger. I attribute our massive improvement to me not being DH.

I wish it were different, but that’s the situation from my perspective. I also get that not every class can always be meta, so despite my main being out of the picture for the time being, I’m sorta happy that 8 out of 9 classes are considered use-able at higher levels, which theoretically makes this one of the more balanced metas so far.

I think a simple little change that would really bring shield up to speed would be to change Stalwart Defender to reflect projectiles while blocking when shield is equipped… This would still have overall less reflects than classes like Warrior’s shield, but it could synergize really well with some utilities, and even mace. Also, to assure it’s not overpowered, simply add an ICD of 1 second (so things like Shelter don’t get out of hand).

Frogger.2375:

The class would go a long ways towards improving if each legend got another utility to choose from to put on the bar. For dungeons and raids, Mallyx and Jalis are only used for the upkeep skills 95% of the time until you swap back into Glint. More options in legend utilities would also open up much more diverse builds and make the class a lot less predictable in pvp and wvw.

I just wanted to echo what frogger mentioned above, and stress the importance of at least potential build variety. Obviously meta will be meta, but sometimes people like to throw in their own play-style, or just misdirect others to get a slight upper hand, and with Revenants, the ONLY place to do that is in traits (and arguably runes I suppose, but those are found out pretty fast) unfortunately.

Thanks for the awesome guide; I am interested if anyone has any recent footage with warrior and similar builds. I’ve been mainly involved in pvp throughout my time in GW2, with very limited pve, and some wvw roaming every once in awhile, but I’m trying to get into the larger scale wvw fights and am looking for some footage to analyze the difference in play styles and positioning (besides just staying on tag of course :P). Would appreciate any links!

Thanks for the feedback guys; there does seem to be a lot of back and forth from the two different perspectives that 1) DH needs buffs to reach the same level as other elite specs, and 2) DH needs more nerfs to be in line with its core spec, as do all other classes and elite specs.

I’m no pro, but as someone who has mained guardian for over 2k matches, with only a couple hundred at most on any others (for the most part I have been doing rev nowadays though, for obvious reasons), I wouldn’t mind sacrificing guardian to be the staple of a balanced class (curently below the other elite specs) in order for the other elite specs to eventually be brought down to about the same level. That being said, I honestly doubt that Anet will ever decide to balance primarily around nerfs than around buffs, which likely will keep guardian/DH out of the meta for an even longer period of time than it already has been.

In the entire competitive scene, there has only ever been a handful of players who have taken DH seriously and attempted to run one in a tournament. What I’m wondering is, what do you guys think it would take to actually make DH viable (but not OP), even assuming a perfect world where pvp/pve/wvw balance was separated?

Buffs to guardian condi application? Buffs to certain weapons? More buffs to core guardian? I’m interested to hear your ideas.